Long-suffering Virgin Media victims see no end to vid PURGATORY

YouTube vids show how bad it is. Unless you're with VM

Here on the networks desk at Vulture Central our inbox runneth over with complaints from fed-up Virgin Media customers who feel that they are being roundly ignored by the telco, which is yet to fix a network peering problem with a mysterious third party.

The major buffering glitch is causing havoc with punters who are downloading data to stream video and other content. And yet, there appears to be no immediate resolution forthcoming from the company.

Despite repeatedly being quizzed by El Reg, Virgin Media declined to name and shame its peering biz partner.

Instead, a spokesman simply offered us this tepid suggestion:

"We'd just encourage anyone who thinks they are affected to add trace routes to our community forum."

Virgin Media had earlier told us that it was "continuing to investigate [the peering problem] and we're working hard with the third party to fully resolve the issue as soon as possible."

One peeved punter has posted a series of videos on YouTube that show how badly the vids are buffering on Virgin Media's broadband service.

Over on VM's forum, the company has effectively told its subscribers that a fix would not be happening anytime soon. Intriguingly, the best Virgin Media seems to be able to offer is "further improvement" on a service that has been crippled for many weeks now - if the level of complaints flooding into El Reg is anything to go by.

The telco also revealed that it was working on a similar issue with Google's YouTube.

The end goal is that Virgin Media hopes to "minimise the effect that the degradation of any particular peering link has on this sort of [video streaming] traffic."

All-in-all, it's a pretty poor response from Virgin Media for customers who may have signed up to the company's broadband service on the promise that it would put an end to network buffering. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, some are threatening to take their complaints to comms regulator Ofcom, or else altogether ditch VM and shop for a new ISP.

Those who have complained but are actually sticking with the crippled service for the time being wondered if they were entitled to refunds from Virgin Media. It's a reasonable request and one that customers ought to be putting directly to the company.

As one reader told us:

Virgin Media really are heading down the TalkTalk route with their customers and I for one am at my wits end.

Unnamed peering network is also not good enough and how dare Virgin Media say the service was partly fixed last week when in fact the buffering has been even worse this week than last?